Book excerpt: Far from heralding a time of unprecedented peace, the end of “actually existing communism” served to usher in new conflicts, new wars and new reasons for war. That much goes without saying. What is controversial, however, is how we might understand and respond to these new wars. This book offers a new approach. Its distinctive and multidisciplinary range of perspectives, offering quite different views, is based on the conviction that if we are to begin to get to grips with this central feature of our 21st Century lives, we have to go beyond an unhelpful moralism on the one hand and a defeatist appeal to “human nature” on the other.